Thunderstruck – Flynn Attorney Sidney Powell Drops Atomic Sledgehammer of Truth on DC Court…. sundance – “In an explosive response filing today, which includes the phrase “sunlight is the best disinfectant”, attorney Sidney Powell has outlined the soup-to-nuts construct of the malicious government action taken during their targeting her client Michael Flynn.”

What Is Justice For McCabe? Tyler Durden – “Of course, if protocol had been followed, McCabe would not have been able to have Flynn grilled without preparation and without counsel. That put Flynn in a very different posture from Hillary Clinton.”

“I don’t pretend to be a McCabe fan. Nevertheless, I have sympathy for him. The 2016 election will define his career, but it does not fairly reflect his long years of service defending the rule of law and American national security. If we could consider his case in a vacuum, and I had my druthers, I would not want to charge him. He was fired for cause in disgrace and is slated to lose at least some of his pension. These are significant penalties. I’d like to be able to say, “Enough is enough, no need to pile on with an indictment.”

But there’s more to it than that. A lot more.

On IG Horowitz’s report and the meaning of Russiagate… neo – “I do have a caveat, however. The fat lady has not yet sung on James Comey.” … “That said, I wonder whether Comey will ever be indicted. I tend to doubt it.”

Trump ‘Lies,’ Biden ‘Slips’ — But Fact Checks Tell Different Story. Kalev Leetaru – “The way in which fact-checkers frame the hyperbole and falsehoods that typically define the political sphere tells us a lot about the fractured state of society, but the narrative of Donald Trump as an unparalleled serial liar appears at odds with actual fact-checking verdicts.”

“Fact-checkers have often adopted a similar distinction in their editorialized headlines, labeling Trump’s errors as “bizarre,” “baffling,” “bungles” and “whoppers” whereas his predecessor Barack Obama’s were merely “misleading” or “cherry-picked.”
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In contrast to CNN’s depiction of Trump as an unrestrained liar and the vivid language used in fact-check headlines, when it comes down to the actual verdicts, it seems fact-checkers haven’t measured Trump’s statements over the last four months to be significantly worse than those of Biden.

For an example of distorted perception, Allahpundit nearly always has something. See Joe Walsh clashes with Fox’s Stuart Varney: Has Trump ever told the American people a lie? – his choice for the big Trump lie? The border wall. Then there is a nitpick on the Chinese negotiations where Allahpundit contradicts himself. The real lie of significance is in Allahpundit’s misrepresentation and distortion supporting ‘fake news’ and a false reality.

Yet another example from Allahpundit is Cavuto rebukes Trump on air: This network doesn’t work for you, Mr. President – this distorts the president in much the same way the loyalty smear does. Obama presented ‘us’ as himself. Trump is clearly referring to the American people. But those who allow their preconceptions and biases to taint their perceptions will find some way, any way, to interpret Trump to fit their narrative rather than make any attempt to fit reality.

Another example is from Mark Perry: Venn diagram of the day using Hurricane Dorian to expose the intellectual bankruptcy of the protectionists, aka ‘scarcityists’ – “graphically illustrate the intellectual inconsistency of many protectionists scarcityists (as Jon Murphy calls them). Scarcityists are those who support protectionist trade policies and claim that erecting trade barriers are economically beneficial to Americans, even though they restrict the flow of goods entering the country from foreign producers, raise prices for Americans, restrict consumers’ choices, and reduce competition.” The cutesy ad hominem is a clue. The distortion of the issue at hand is another. The falsity is in context deceit and over-simplification of factors at play.

America, the Racist. Mary Grabar – “As usual, capitalism is the culprit. Zinn plays fast and loose with numbers and sources in his effort to prove that capitalism is at the root of racism.” This is about a ‘history’ book that has influenced public education since 1980. It is a very long ‘fact check’ concerning a propaganda effort of significant impacts.

“In fact, according to the best quantitative evidence, 12 to 13 percent of slaves died in transit from Africa to the Americas during the history of the Middle Passage. Sometimes a larger percentage of the slave ship’s crew died on the voyage. In the Dutch slave trade, one in five crewmen died at sea. But it suits Zinn’s purpose to exaggerate the true numbers and to ignore the historical context of a time and place when life was more perilous for all.

Zinn acknowledges that slavery existed in Africa—where, in fact, it predated the discovery of America—but presents it as a kinder, gentler kind of slavery
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So why did such an evil, capitalist system fight a bloody war to end slavery? After all, within the capitalist system, slavery was profitable: it “remained a profitable investment at the time it was abolished regardless of country,” write . So there was something beyond the profit motive that ended slavery in the West. Yes, within the capitalist country that Zinn condemns, slavery was killed for moral reasons. …

In fact, the campaign to abolish slavery was a Western thing and a relatively new thing at the time.
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Histories in the Soviet Union airbrushed certain facts, as they did certain personages from photographs. Zinn does the same thing, airbrushing out evidence that contradicts his claims.

Rejection of Moral Absolutes Plagues the Modern Left. Trevor Thomas – “If death — anyone’s death — brings you joy, you should intently re-examine your worldview.”

“However, today’s Democratic Party is as far from rational as it is from moral. Even more than the vengeful tweets over a dead philanthropist or the angry threats over a potential Supreme Court vacancy, few things illustrate this as well as the gender debate the modern Left insists we have.

Rational thinking has a lot to do with moral behavior.

Hubris as A Strategy… sundance – “This is a justification memo, written by an outgoing National Security Advisor Susan Rice to document why there have been multiple false and misleading statements given to the incoming President Trump and all of his officials.”

“Every lie, every omission, every false and/or misleading statement, must first be filtered through the “By The Book” prism of Trump being considered a Russian asset. This is the justification trap democrats are waiting to exploit for maximum damage and diminishment of counter attack.

The “By the Book” justification, where every action could have been taken because Trump might have been an actual Russian operative, is the weapon under the camouflage tarp as the radical left lures-in their political opposition. They shrug their shoulders and say in condescending voice: ‘well, we didn’t know; we had to be prudent‘, etc.

Getting outraged about the Obama administration’s lies, misstatements and fabrications can backfire if you don’t first think about it from their constructed frame-of-reference.

How do you solve a problem like James Comey? Patricia McCarthy – “The I.G. Report on Comey released on Thursday is a damning document. Much of what it reveals is not new, but the details within are shocking.” Basically, the system of checks and balances seems to have failed and, worse, many are beginning to think the implementation o necessary consequences has failed as well.

“All of the participants must pay for their crimes. If they do not, the Constitution means nothing, the law means nothing, justice and fairness no longer prevail in America. May AG Barr and John Durham be the men we have been promised they are. Comey and his colluders in crime need to go to prison. That is how you solve the problem of culprits like Comey. And that is all he is, a culprit, no better than a common criminal who hoped to sidestep the law. Either way, there will be a special place in hell and the history books for this team of turncoats.

The Mythical Trump Hydra. Victor Davis Hanson – “We forgot that hydras are mythical creatures and only the delusional believe them to be real.” … “Here are a few of his supposedly monstrous manifestations.”

“In reality, the Trump empire reportedly has declined by nearly $1 billion in net value, aside from the tens of millions of his own money that Trump spent on the 2016 campaign. Trump’s business interests are the most thoroughly investigated of any recent president in memory. Obama and the Clintons made millions from their presidencies; Trump may well end up losing billions.
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the Heritage Foundation in January 2018 found that the first months of the Trump Administration were more conservative than any prior Republican in recent memory
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Donald Trump is mentally and physically ill, unfit to be president … In reality, Trump easily aced the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which calibrates pre-dementia, … In terms of age, Trump seems far more vigorous than most men at 73 … Trump is able to speak extemporaneously for extended periods of time while holding the attention of an audience of thousands.
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Trump’s real crime in matters of race and ethnicity is that, all during his pre-presidential career and during his time in office, he simply ignored race and thus felt no compunction about deriding anyone—white, black, brown, Asian, or Latino.
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Trump is purportedly an utter incompetent executive. … In reality [economy, international relations, …]

The strange thing about these various hydra heads of Donald Trump is that very few of them were based on any empirical evidence. Instead, they revealed more about the conspiracist than the object of his conspiracy theory—namely a pathological hatred of Trump and his supporters that blinded them to the actual record of governance.

Talking about rationalizations and obsessions, consider the slew of homosexual stories today. Here’s What People Who Used To Be Transgender Are Telling The Supreme Court. Nicole Russell – “In an unusual amicus brief, a group of people who used to be transgender say that not only should gender identity not be a protected class, but that it’s an imaginary construct of traumatized minds.” This is supported, yet again, in There Is No ‘Gay Gene,’ Comprehensive Scientific Study Finds. Matt Margolis – “So, what happens when science proves that homosexuals aren’t “born that way”? Perhaps we’ll find out.” But the rationalization only gets more zealous and extreme: LGBT and fourth-graders. Phil Brizzolara – “Illinois has passed a law requiring that “the history curriculum in public schools include lessons on [sic] the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people ” see also Portland State U Punishes Professor For Proving Gender Studies Is A Joke. Peter Wood and David Randall – “Dr. Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State, joined two other academics to hoax the purveyors of gender studies and kindred fields committed to turning personal gripes into taxpayer-funded “studies.” … Portland State stuck with the idea that he had carried out “improper research on human subjects.”

U.S. Versus China. Richard Fernandez – “The competition between the United States and China for the leadership of the 21st century is basically a contest between social and economic systems.”

“China is a corrupt totalitarian state worse in many respects than the Western establishments it threatens. Its triumph is hardly to be desired. But the Communist Party of China faces exactly the same limits to its power its counterparts do: competition from the outside. It is the fear of American innovation, not the vapid declarations by politicians that they “stand with Hong Kong” which really prevents the commissars from plunging the dagger into it. The instinct for survival keeps Beijing from crushing the rebellious Hong Kongers. One wonders whether the complacent rulers of Western capitals are similarly constrained or whether they have been in power too long to feel threatened.

Ultimately the leadership of the 21st century will go to whichever society fixes the problem of information corruption first. If the West can rebuild its system of monetary and civilizational accounting then it can regain its vitality. Alternatively, China, with the memory of poverty and humiliation still vivid in living memory, may pay greater homage to the facts. If Western civilization fails this epitaph will be chiseled on its tombstone: “we thought the facts didn’t matter.”

More on the phenomenal, ‘eye-popping’ success of Success Academy Charter Schools in NYC. Mark J. Perry – “What is truly amazing is that of the 30 elementary schools in the entire state of New York (the top 1.24% of schools) with the highest Average Standard Score for the 2018-2019 school year, two-thirds of those top schools (20) are Success Academy Charter Schools.” i.e. success and achievement is under attack. Nevada has a similar problem as Californication takes over the state government.

“That A Member Of The Elite Like Bill Dudley Could Open This Can Of Worms Is Quite Staggering”. Tyler Durden – “The implications here are simply staggering. We have a former Fed official lobbying sitting Fed officials to deliberately damage the economy and move away from their stated mandate in order to either force a policy change from an elected president, or to force that president out of office!” This is the global superiority thing as a core belief of the deep state. The efforts to correct trade abuse by countries such as China involve currency valuation and national debts and, from there, overall economic health. Durden uses a “former Fed member Dudley” public missive to illustrate how the globalists have painted themselves into a corner.

Via Instapundit citing the National Review nagware site: “VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Trump — or What, Exactly? Let’s compare Trump’s policies and behavior to that of prior presidents — and to his 2020 opponents’.” … “To counter every signature Trump issue, there is almost no rational alternative advanced.” … “Trump’s crime is that, without sanitized surgical gloves, he completely ripped the scab off what we call “journalism” and exposed a festering wound of narcissistic, mostly incompetent, and utterly partisan reportage.”

There is a lot of TDS and, in the more civil circles, it gets rationalized as not agreeing with the President’s policies or what he says. Any who examine this rationalization quickly see that no rational alternative is advanced to support the distaste and hatred and disagreement. 

The Babylon Bee has been added to our list of sources. It recently got into a tussle with Snopes over fact checking satire as if it was serious straight-up news. Snopes is trending towards WaPo and NYT type ‘fact checking’ that leans heavily towards Leftist Propaganda Efforts. In light of yesterday’s academic psychiatrist interview on CNN, consider this Bee headline: CNN: ‘Our Ratings Are Only Tanking Because Trump Is Killing Off Viewers By The Millions’. “A guest on Stelter’s show suggested that Trump has killed more people than Hitler, Mao, and Stalin put together, and Stelter had to agree.” … “After the segment blaming Trump for the deaths of millions and CNN’s subsequent decline, the station continued to air 24/7 Trump coverage, which mostly consisted of the hosts screaming at the sky.”

How The Media Enables Destructive Climate Change Hysteria. David Harsanyi – “Reporters have a responsibility to challenge the assumptions and exaggerations of activists.”

“Last weekend, the former chairman of psychiatry at Duke University, Dr. Allen Frances, claimed that Donald Trump “may be responsible for many more million deaths” than Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong combined. Frances, author of the fittingly titled “Twilight of American Sanity,” would later clarify by tweeting that he was talking about the “[t]errible damage Trump is doing to world climate at this global warming tipping point may be irreversable/could kill hundreds of millions of people in the coming decades.”

That’s quite the bold statement, considering the hefty death toll the Big Three extracted. But, really, it isn’t that shocking to hear. Frances’ pseudohistoric twaddle comports well with the pseudoscientific twaddle that’s been normalized in political discourse. Every year Democrats ratchet up the doomsday scenarios, so we should expect related political rhetoric to become correspondingly unhinged.
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On climate change, you can say virtually anything, and no one will challenge your zealotry.
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If journalists did their jobs, they would contest some of the assumptions and exaggerations that have now congealed as “crisis” in their newsrooms. Not necessarily the science, but the predictive abilities of scientists or the hyperbolic statements of politicians.
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Worse, instead of conveying this good news, the media keeps cherrypicking problems without any context.
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The story of humankind is one of acclimatization. We use technological advances and efficiencies to deal with change. We will adapt to organic and anthropogenic changes, as we always do, because it’s a lot cheaper than dismantling modernity. That’s the reality, no matter how hysterical activists get on TV.

Four Reports of Assaults Incited by CNN Journalists in Just 6 Weeks. John Nolte – “In the age of Jeff Zucker, CNN’s open bloodlust against Trump and his supporters, its open encouragement and embrace of violence to meet its left-wing goals, and its own staffers’ involvement in violence and alleged assaults, has become the norm.”

Evidence that solar power in its current form may increase pollution … neo – “It seems it’s not the solar power itself that causes the problem, but the way solar and gas power work in concert” – messing with systems is always messy and usually loaded with unforeseen complications and consequences.

Wind Turbines Aren’t All They’re Cracked Up To Be. DCE – “We can’t but help hearing about how renewables will save the Earth, cause the waters to recede from the flooded cities due to sea level rise, cure halitosis and male pattern baldness, and help with the “heartbreak of psoriasis”. But the reality is that renewables, specifically wind power, can’t meet the needs of our increasingly technological civilization.” … “It all boils down to this: Renewables are a scam for raking in millions of dollars in government subsidies and the ratepayers, and particularly the poorer ratepayers be damned.”

Duke University Shrink: Trump May Be Worse Than Hitler, Stalin, And Mao. Tyler Durden – “The former chief of the Duke University Psychiatry Department went on CNN this weekend to claim President Trump is mentally unfit for the office, and proceeded to up the hyperbole quotient to unprecedented levels. … He then suggested that it would be acceptable to lie about Trump’s mental state if there was a way to use that false narrative to get him out of office.” Consider the ‘gravitas’ of the source of this as contrasted to the assertions absent any support and the claim that the end justifies the means. This is what we have in mainstream academia; the people who would be certifying ‘red flag’ claims to deny constitutional rights; the people whose explicit professional guidelines prohibit this sort of behavior. Just who is the dangerous one here?

CNN: Trump is Worse than Hitler, Mao and Stalin Combined Because Climate Change. Eric Worrall – “If one Godwin card doesn’t move your audience, throw the full deck…” This may help explain where that ‘millions of deaths’ idea comes from: climate change! (just like every other doom and gloom distopia fantasy these days it seems)

“I used to wonder if some people were attracted to psychology courses because they wanted to find solutions to their own problems.

I no longer believe this to be the case; but it is way past time the handful of psychology professionals, who in my opinion flout their own ethical guidelines by offering wild public opinions about the mental state of people whose policies they dislike, took a long hard look in the mirror.

Macron’s Iran stunt. Paul Mirengoff – “France has lost its grandeur, but perhaps not its desire to seem grand. Macron, in any case, possesses that desire in spades. Zarif’s visit confirms that satisfying it means more to Macron than any particular policy objective.” It’s another ‘end justifies the means’ with no consideration of the implications of the means taken. Mirengoff has another one toward the same point in Police chiefs: Warren’s false claims are putting police officers’ lives in danger. Then his colleague Scott Johnson picks up on Iran again with Iran revisited (2) … “To this date the American public has not been advised of the side deals that the Obama administration made with Iran to announce its agreement to the JCPOA. ”

Godwin? see wikipedia.

Beijing Pledges Fight “To the End” Against U.S. Economic Confrontation – Let It Be So… sundance – “An announcement from China on Saturday, pledging a full economic war against the United States, will likely not come as a surprise for most CTH readers. However, it does serve as emphasis for our 2017 statement: “prepare your affairs accordingly“…”

“Peace or war. Win or lose. Yin and Yang. Culturally there is no middle position in dealings with China; they are not constitutionally capable of understanding or valuing the western philosophy of mutual benefit where concession of terms gains a larger outcome.
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President Trump doesn’t apply force, he simply creates outcomes where the best alternative for the adversary is to change their approach according to their own best interests. President Trump positions the location of the interests themselves, he does not need the direct application of force.

What Globalism Did Was To Transfer The US Economy To China, PCR. Tyler Durden – “In effect, the US economy is being moved out of the First World into the Third World.” Durden falls into the consensus trap and into casting ad hominem judgment by moving from a view of the entire forest down to a microscopic image of a very small, selected, event. Perhaps Durden needs to climb down off his mountain and open his thoughts to looking at other paths than those he knows now.

“One has to wonder that there is not a single economist anywhere in the Trump administration, the Federal Reserve, or anywhere else in Washington capable of comprehending the situation and conveying an understanding to President Trump.
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Real statistical analysis, as contrasted with the official propaganda, shows that the happy picture of a booming economy is an illusion created by statistical deception.
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How does a country recover when it has given its economy away to a foreign country that it now demonizes as an enemy? What better example is there of a ruling class that is totally incompetent than one that gives its economy bound and gagged to an enemy so that its corporate friends can pocket short-term riches?

We can’t blame this on Trump. He inherited the problem, and he has no advisers who can help him understand the problem and find a solution. No such advisers exist among neoliberal economists. I can only think of four economists who could help Trump, and one of them is a Russian.

Political Forecast: Stormy Weather Ahead. Clarice Feldman – “With no saleable candidates or agenda I expect the Democrats to grow ever more pugilistic and the press to grow ever more blind to their incitements to violence. And voters to become even more disgusted by both.”

End of the Peer Show. Mark Steyn – “But what if there’s a more effective way to silence your critics? Say, by proving scientifically that they should be expelled from polite society.” This is about the Mann v. Ball court case and a recent academic effort to use power politics rather than intellectual integrity.

“Nature, founded in 1869, is generally regarded (with Science) as one of the two most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the world. Like many great nineteenth-century institutions its distinguished past lends an undeserved imprimatur to its meretricious and ever more politicized present.
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Nature’s paper cloaks itself in scientific language (“quantifying disparities”) to pass off politicized pseudo-science as the real thing. Note the loaded terms, starting with the division of what’s actually a wide spectrum of opinion into two teams, 386 “expert scientists” versus 386 “contrarians”.
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Furthermore, DeSmog’s “extensive documentation” of us “disinformation” peddlers is anonymous:
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Come to that, why are over a third of the articles “analyzed” from just three publications
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Gotcha. So you’re just another guy in the shut-up business, a phenomenon of our times rising far more rapidly than sea levels in the Maldives. “Consensus enforcement” (in Dr Curry’s very useful formulation) stalks our public discourse
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Politicized science is something we used to leave to the Soviets and other totalitarians.

Even with Steyn’s satire and humor the contrast is evident. This is specifics and topic focused rather than broad, anonymous, ad hominem, and judgmental.

Bizarro World: Parents Terrified Of Chemicals Feed Toxic Supplements To Their Kids. Josh Bloom – “Suffice it to say that most people are genuinely clueless when it comes to chemistry, let alone, evaluation of the risks and/or benefits of different chemicals.”

“Many of the same people who want to shove their kids into a lead-lined safe room in the basement when someone walks by with a can of Raid or diet soda are unknowingly feeding them multiple unknown chemicals by giving them dietary supplements, virtually none of which are useful and some are dangerous.

I have to tip my hat to the supplement industry. Just like the organic food industry, it has managed to pull the sustainable wool over the eyes of a whole bunch of Americans by convincing them that what they sell is chemical-free and harmless. It is anything but – something Dr. Henry Miller and I wrote about recently for Issues and Insights (See Will Dangerous Dietary Supplements Finally Be Reined In?)
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It is mind-boggling that so many people are terrified of chemicals that they avoid touching cash register receipts, or won’t eat anything not labeled GM-free, blithely feed their kids who-knows-what because they perceive supplements as safe, natural, and chemical-free.

Instapundit: EVOLUTION IN ACTION: Vegan parents whose strict diet left baby ‘severely malnourished’ avoid jail. “Authorities discovered the couple’s child so malnourished that at 19-months she weighed just 4.9 kilograms (10.8 pounds). Further medical tests revealed that her bones had not developed since birth. Her development was so stunted she didn’t even have any teeth, Seven News reported. Her parents said they had kept the girl on a strict vegan diet.”

Slavery In America Did Not Begin In 1619, And Other Things The New York Times Gets Wrong. Lyman Stone – “It began in 1513. Any argument for a 1619 date implicitly suggests that the American project is an inherently Anglo project:” The real problem with this author’s arguments is his view that “Furthermore, a serious accounting for slavery has to wrestle with the experience of Native Americans and Hawaiian islanders, and especially the status of their ancestral lands and sovereign rights.” i.e. much of his basis is that slavery “is an immigrant.” He struggles with the idea that even the ‘native peoples’ of the Americas engaged in slavery as well as those everywhere else, including Africa.

“Slavery was a universal law. While I cannot say for certain, it is possible there was no free soil in the entire world—that is, no society that categorically forbade all slavery.

But then something changed. Revolutionary agitation led to war in 1776, and by 1777, Vermont’s de facto secession from New York and New Hampshire created the first modern polity in the western hemisphere to forbid the keeping of slaves. In 1777, war with Britain was barely begun.
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In other words, Americans were early adopters of abolition. We were the first to establish formally abolitionist constitutions and states, the second to ban the trade in slaves, and middle-of-the-pack in achieving uniform abolition of slavery.

The problem is in the presumption “Undoubtedly, we still must atone for much.” This is Biblical Judgment and a path towards repeating history and not learning from it. Such judgment is common among the moral preeners who decry the faults and failures of others as insufficient or deficient.

Why The Case For Reparations Would Be Immediately Thrown Out Of Court. Benjamin R. Dierker – “Tort law seeks to make a harmed party whole and make the wrongdoing party pay. Slavery reparations, it seems, seeks to make an unharmed party “whole” and extract the payment from an innocent party. This is backward on both counts.” The is why Great Britain paid reparations to the slave owners when the abolished slavery as it was the owners who were damaged by having their property taken from them [wikipedia].

“We will never hold the nation together by looking backward at harms we cannot repair, because the wrongdoers and victims are gone. The only thing we can do is strive forward with reasonable care and duties to one another to prevent new harms.

Why There Is No Justification For Forcing Taxpayers To Pay For Art. Noah Diekemper – “An opinion article in The Baltimore Sun last week criticized President Donald Trump’s record of musicians and other artists he’s invited to perform at the White House.”

“The article commits a number of digressions and blunders: It engages in remote psychology by speculating on Trump possibly having “musical anhedonia”; its closing charge seems to confound refinement with some degree of moral virtue; and the author grounds the meaningfulness of music in its service of “evolutionary goals.” How sublime.

They want NEA money and where other people to pay it. They try to parade their superiority by flinging moral judgments with flowery words at those who do not agree with them.

CEOs’ Woke Joke: Surrendering To ‘Stakeholders’. I & I Editorial Board – “it’s a sad sign of the times when a group of people with such great financial responsibility sign a “pledge” that commits them to doing the exact opposite of what they’re supposed to do, in the only economic system that has ever delivered wealth and happiness to hundreds of millions of people.”

“Workers not rewarded? Raise their pay.

Rapid change leaving your workers behind? Offer them better training. But please, no moral sermons.

By both law and custom, it is a corporate leader’s fiduciary responsibility to look after his or her shareholders’ interests. To do otherwise is a breach of the faith investors show when they risk their hard-won savings. To tell them they’re no longer the company’s main concern goes beyond foolish — it’s a danger to our free-market system.

The 181 CEOs who signed the pledge make a categorical mistake when they believe that serving their shareholders doesn’t advance a higher societal function. It does.
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Those CEOs who signed the pledge might not have realized it, but they don’t get to make this decision. The people do. CEOs who impose far-left ideas on their corporations deserve to be sued by their cheated shareholders.

The New York Times Is Trying to Rewrite History to Fit Its Biases. Cal Thomas – “This is the stuff of totalitarian regimes where the media serve as a propaganda organ for the state, in this case the surging left wing of the Democratic Party.”

“Not satisfied with practicing what used to be called journalism, it appears the newspaper’s ultimate goal is to change what is taught in public schools so that children will no longer think highly of their country because of the “stain” of slavery, a stain that has been more than paid for in blood and federal programs, which have attempted to lift some descendants of slaves out of poverty.
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The Times’ attempt to shape history to fit its own biases is not journalism. If public schools follow its lead, they will begin to resemble schools in countries where freedom is not the prevailing tenet and antithetical to what the Founders gave us. America’s greatness eventually led to the freeing of slaves and a chance at a better life for their descendants.

Contagion, cont’d: Marriott cook latest to get arrested in nationwide wave. Ed Morrissey – “Excessive media coverage doesn’t make people crazy. However, the obsessive nature of coverage of mass shootings — and political exploitation of them — incentivized already-borderline people to tip over and use mass shootings as a way to express their malice and frustration.”

Tyranny Of The Minority. Chuck Dinerstein – “California is acting as that tyrannical minority; and they are not alone. In an increasingly interconnected global world, one region’s regulatory decisions can impact, for good or bad, those decisions in other areas. The leader in the regulation of privacy concerns remains the EU and the General Data Protection Regulations enacted in 2016.”

President Trump Explains The Big Picture: “The fact is, somebody had to take China on”… sundance – “After receiving the third question, on the same subject, President Trump paused and then went deep into the heart of the issue.”

What the grievance brigade misunderstands about America. Heather Mac Donald – “The ongoing crusade against America’s civic rituals and founding values picked up pace this summer.”

“The anti-American crusaders’ woeful ignorance of the past goes beyond thinking that Abraham Lincoln owned slaves; that ignorance extends to the present world as well. They have a brittle intolerance of human frailty and of the messiness and complexity of social change. America’s founders made compromises with their own ideals that today we may regard as egregious and unacceptable. But humans are never perfect; history is a record of moral failures as well as triumphs. We learn as much from the former as from the latter; erasing history is simply a power play and an act of sullen revenge.

Sullen revenge?

The Washington Post Lies About a Conservative Journalist. John Hinderaker – “this incident is a good reminder of why no one takes far-left “news” outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times seriously. They lie. Consistently, every day.”

Cosmic Injustice. Victor Davis Hanson – “Politicians ignore felonies in their midst, preferring to hector the misdemeanors of the universe.” … “The next time a legislator, mayor, or governor rails about plastic straws or the Paris Climate Accord, be assured that his state’s roads are clogged, his public schools failing—and he is clueless or indifferent about it.”

No, Slave-Based Cotton Plantations Are Not the Model for “American Capitalism”. Rick Hills – “It seems trite to point out the glaringly obvious, but Desmond’s analogy ignores one distinction between slave-powered enterprises and a modern corporate employment: Slavery prohibited workers from quitting and moving to a new job.” … “How could the Times publish a piece that attacks American businesses enterprises as analogous to slave-based cotton plantations yet never mentions legal impediments to labor mobility of the defining feature of the latter?”

Assisted Suicide Avoidance – John Brennan Intel Asset Joseph Mifsud “Gave Audio Tape Deposition Before Going Into Hiding”… sundance – “professor Mifsud admitted to being a western intelligence asset who was part of a CIA intelligence “operation” against candidate Donald Trump in March 2016.” This is from John Solomon.

“A long-tracked pattern reflects the DOJ and FBI leak their needs to the New York Times. The preferred outlet for the U.S. State Department is CNN; and the Washington Post generally comes out first with leaks in defense of the CIA agenda.
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The entire WaPo article is fraught with highly manipulated narrative engineering intended to cloud the fact that clear evidence exists that Professor Mifsud’s engagement with George Papadopoulos was directed by some entity other than Mifsud.

Judicial Watch: Trove Of Docs Exposes How Senior DOJ, FBI And Private Contractors Targeted Trump. Sara Carter – These clarify the Ohr saga on the infamous dossier.

The Role of Gun Control in Dictatorship. Jeffrey T. Brown – “President Trump is accused on a minute-by-minute basis of being a tyrant, but his accusers remain free.” … “They can say and do the most vile and corrupt things, knowing that because the president is not a tyrant, nothing will be done to them for their crusade to erode and destroy our current social and political systems.”

“While the president correctly identifies the propagandists in the leftist media as philosophical enemies of the people they work every day to conquer, he doesn’t announce any plans to unilaterally cancel or rescind their rights. He does not threaten to make their words and intentions illegal. He doesn’t threaten to trample the Bill of Rights because they hate him and the country he works to preserve and protect, often from them. He has never once hinted at criminalizing their political opposition, or their open warfare on the Constitution and every civil protection enjoyed by Americans who refuse to subscribe to despotism.

On the left, however, the seeds are being sown to create a police state in which the politically compliant and complicit will be safe, but the holdouts will be brutally punished.
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The Founders did not insist on the Second Amendment so that they could hunt in perpetuity but because they feared a large, authoritarian government controlled by unethical and immoral politicians and their mobs.
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the earliest violent confrontations will be with armed civilian mobs, successors to the ones we see now at the homes of political enemies, calling for their deaths and those of their family members.
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Authoritarians have always understood that gun control is political control, which is why they don’t practice it against their own supporters. Gun control is for political enemies, and both precedes and hastens the eventual purge necessary to dictatorship. It really is that simple.

Calling out the climate hypocrites. Thomas Lifson – “Obvious and repulsive hypocrisy on the part of wealthy and connected people telling us that we must sacrifice our standard of living – indeed, our very way of life – finally is being called out.”

Election 2020: It’s the Crowds, Stupid! Brian C. Joondeph – “Rather than listen to the nay-sayers on cable news, use your own eyes. Look at crowd sizes and enthusiasm as a better metric than opinion polls which oversample Democrats”

It’s one thing to make false statements about, say, taxes or crowd size. It’s another falsely to accuse someone of murder and to use the false accusation to peddle the notion that policing in America systematically puts innocent black lives in jeopardy.

Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren lie about the Michael Brown case. Paul Mirengoff – “Such a claim is divisive and incendiary — far more so than anything President Trump has said about race.”

The Strange Case of ‘White Supremacy’. Victor Davis Hanson – “in America there was a real chance to overcome not American sins per se, but the ancient sins of mankind in general.”

“America’s founding documents were unique in their singular calls for innate and universal human freedom and equality under the law that would eventually and logically demand reification of such ideals.
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More exceptionally, the United States did not resort to a coercive political ideology such as Stalinist Communism to unite the diverse, or embrace an all-encompassing religious orthodoxy in the manner of the dramatic spread of Islam between the 8th and 16th centuries among widely disparate peoples.
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Why, then, if we as a people are plagued from the outset by an incurable “white supremacy” and “white privilege,” would hundreds of thousands of nonwhite immigrants each year wish to enter such a dreadful place?

The answer to why America appears attractive to newcomers is obvious: what global elites say and what non-elites do are two quite different things.

“Green” Energy Is Sinister. John Hinderaker – “Far from being well-intentioned, as most assume, “green” energy is the great corporate scam of our age. And green energy is not kind to the Earth as school children are taught. Rather, wind and solar are terrible for the environment.”

The New York Times takes a good long hard look at itself in the mirror… neo – “Forget the old function of the editorial page or of op-eds. An editorial isn’t enough; the opinion must be in the article and in the headline, force fed to the reader. ”

Democrats say: nice SCOTUS you’ve got there, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it … neo – citing David French on “the most malicious Supreme Court brief I’ve ever seen.”

So Trump is the divisive one when he brings up Democrat policies? Jack Hellner – “I find it tremendously humorous that people pretending to be journalists, as they campaign to elect Democrats and implement their policies, find it divisive if President Trump campaigns by pointing out Democrat policies.” … “Here is how Democrats debate issues:”

Stunning Day of Economic Gaslighting – Despite All Positive Data, Corporate Media Cheering For Recession… sundance – “The Wall St./Media pundit goal is to erode consumer confidence, instill fear, and hopefully get people to sit on those high wages…. thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Judicial Watch: Trove Of Docs Exposes How Senior DOJ, FBI And Private Contractors Targeted Trump. Sara Carter – “The dossier is nothing more than Russian and anti-Trump disinformation,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who worked as a Russia analyst. “Once the Russian’s got wind that Fusion GPS was digging into Trump’s ties with Russia, the Kremlin used it to create chaos in the United States. It was a relationship of convenience for both the Democratic opposition and the Kremlin.”

Red Flag Laws in the Age of Political Psychiatry. Christopher Roach – “Crime has a cost, but so do infringements on civil liberties, such as detentions, convictions, institutionalization, and other lesser measures like injunctions and protection orders.” … “At various times, psychiatry has been abused to suppress political dissent as an end-run around the publicity and procedural necessities of criminal trials.”

Trump Green Card Rule: Three Lefty Lies Debunked. David Catron – “Just when you thought left-wing mendacity couldn’t get any worse …”

4 Myths About Mass Shootings. Christopher J. Ferguson, Stetson University – “A lot of bad information can follow in the wake of such emotional events; clear, data-based discussions of mass homicides can get lost among political narratives.”

“Long-term studies of youth consistently find that violent games are not a risk factor for youth violence anywhere from one to eight years later.
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Overall, though, the ethnic composition of the group of all mass shooters in the U.S. is roughly equivalent to the American population.
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Whether mental illness is or is not related to mass shootings – or criminal violence more broadly – is a nuanced question.
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But using standard definitions, most data suggest that the prevalence of mass shootings has stayed fairly consistent over the past few decades.

Joe Biden Is Wrong. There Is No Compelling Evidence That Assault-Weapon Bans Work. Robert Verbruggen – “Recently, though, some have claimed that the law reduced mass shootings in particular, which account for a tiny fraction of overall homicides but command an incredibly disproportionate amount of public attention.”

“However, the three most important facts about mass shootings are (A) they have historically been incredibly rare, with entire years passing without one sometimes; (B) they are contagious, with high-profile incidents inpiring copycats and competitors; and (C) they are incredibly variable in the number of fatalities

WSJ, WaPo, NYT Keep Spreading False Claims About Internet Law. Matthew Feeney – “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is much debated and under bipartisan attack.”

Gore Says His Global Warming Predictions Have Come True? Can He Prove It? J. Frank Bullitt – “Gore has been making declarative statements about global warming for about as long as he’s been in the public eye. He has yet to prove a single claim, though. But how can he? The few examples above show that despite his insistence to the contrary, his predictions have failed.”

“Even if all turned out to be more accurate than a local three-day forecast, there’s no way to say with 100% certainty that the extreme conditions were caused by human activity. Our climate is a complex system, there are too many other variables, and the science itself has limits, unlike Gore’s capacity to inflate the narrative.

Vox: Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are wrong about Michael Brown’s death. John Sexton – “What we were told about the Michael Brown shooting by activists and the media, as was also the case with the Trayvon Martin shooting, was a lie. The fact that major Democratic candidates for President are still telling that lie five years later ought to be a much bigger story.”

Amazon knocked for helping police with doorbell cameras. Jazz Shaw – “This story at NBC News provides yet another example of how so-called digital privacy advocates are going overboard and essentially rooting for criminals instead of the police.”

Why target Tucker Carlson? It’s part of the left’s war on the right. Victor Davis Hanson – “his sin? Carlson, over the past few months and especially the past few days, has voiced some inconvenient truths that earn outrage but not refutation:”

The poisonous lie of racist policing. Paul Mirengoff – “That’s a reality so obvious even a rational leftist should grasp it. Unfortunately, rational leftists are in short supply.”

The Left and Its Dishonest ‘Truths’. Nelson A. Siebert – ““Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” is a lesson that the Democrat Left has mastered to perfection.” … “The Left is omnipresent, while the right, in contrast, is Bigfoot or the Chupacabra.”

Another athletic egomaniac looking for some extra spotlight by dissing the U.S. flag. Monica Showalter – “By now, the routine of athletes calling attention to themselves by dissing the U.S. flag at some athletic event has become so de rigueur you could write the script before it happens.” Show your privilege by insulting its source.

“It’s disgusting. The little creep is doing this because he can see how it brings on the rewards. It’s not even original either, it’s a faded Xerox copy of a three-year old stunt pioneered by a washed-up football player who wanted attention and athletic endorsements for himself, too. Insult the flag, reap the big bucks, this is how the corrupted game is played now.

It’s sickening because courageous U.S. men and women have died for this flag, and the brave people of Hong Kong are defying a brutal communist juggernaut by waving that very same flag as the world’s strongest beacon of freedom

The Strange Case of ‘White Supremacy’. Victor Davis Hanson – “racial politics is a mess. The standards by which racial chauvinism either is deemed dangerous or regrettable and a mere aberration, are largely political.”

The Trump Obsession Comes for California’s Water. Jack Fowler – “Its consequence will be to preempt any possible forthcoming federal regulations that would result in people and farms (instead of, seriously, the Pacific Ocean) getting more, already available water. That might even be its purpose”

“While Democrats turn their Trump obsession to water denial, CWA recommends a comprehensive approach to the state’s H2O problems — three steps that are central to fixing it given the science and needs, but far-fetched given the power of progressive ideology that governs the Golden State:

The Left’s Exclusionary Language. John Hinderaker – “A reader points out this article by a liberal in the Atlantic. … “Almost religious” understates the case, but the author sums up quite well the bizarre world of public discourse in which we find ourselves.”

My Preliminary List of Things That Irritate Me The Most About Modern Discourse. Coyote Blog – A good list but he can’t see the mirror. c.f. the cite of Rush Limbaugh. He is a member of the ‘both sides the same’ club and cannot even use his own list of irritants to discriminate between population clusters.

sundance is on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) implications of the Ohr interviews. WARNING – Troubling Statement by President Trump: “We’re dealing with Senator Burr. We’re dealing with the committee” … Corrupt Senate Intelligence Committee Resurfaces in Bruce Ohr 302’s … AG Bill Barr’s Other Problem – The 2018 DOJ and FBI Coverup To Protect The Senate Intelligence Committee … “The problem for Attorney General Bill Barr is not only investigating what we don’t know, but rather navigating through what ‘We The People’ are already aware of…. A branch of the United States government (Legislative) was attempting a coup against the leader of another branch of government (Executive); by using the Senate Intelligence Committee and designated corrupt agents within the executive branch cabinet.”

Two Tiered System Of Justice: Top FBI Officials Escape Prosecution, While Others Pay Heavy Price. Sara Carter – “Remember how former FBI Director James Comey laughed publicly about how he set up the former National Security Advisor. He also contends it wouldn’t have happened to another administration:” … “As an American, I’m more than disturbed -I’m sickened – by their uncanny ability to skirt the law and how their friends in high ranking positions are working diligently still to protect them.”

Andrew McCabe Files Federal Civil Lawsuit Against DOJ and FBI – Claims Trump Carried Out “Unconstitutional Plan” Against Him… sundance – “The motive here is 100% political obfuscation, and the same Lawfare team is involved in the construct.”

“Again, as with the earlier Strzok lawsuit, both are not going through the process within the Department of Labor for a wrongful termination complaint. Instead both are using federal courts in an effort to construct a narrative of sorts. …

Both Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok are claiming their first amendment (speech) and fifth amendment (due process) rights were violated. Both have filed civil suits under the same pretext. However, McCabe’s Lawfare lawyers construct an argument that goes one step further.

According to Andrew McCabe, President Donald Trump constructed a master conspiracy of influence upon the DOJ and FBI; thereby usurping the powers of the constitution in a sketchy legal theory they cannot define.
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These Lawfare ideologues are nuts. … These ideologues, purely political partisan ideologues, were running the DOJ and FBI.
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These are not normal-thinking people. These are radical leftists, with a perspective of educated activism and organizing at the core of their self identity and effort. These are Marxist views, outlooks and engagements with the world around them; demanding conformity and manipulating the law to achieve an ideological goal.

Five years ago Michael Brown died, and a movement based on lies was born. William A. Jacobson – “the lies are being spread again by many people, including by presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, who falsely claim Brown was murdered.”

John McWhorter: ‘We were lied to’ about what happened in Ferguson (Update). John Sexton – “McWhorter makes it clear that he’s not saying there isn’t a problem between black Americans and the police. In fact, he thinks the other Justice Department report, the one that found all sorts of misbehavior by the mostly white police force, may help explain why Mike Brown reacted the way he did that day five years ago.” This is replacing the lie about Brown’s death with a lie about black crime and its consequences.

Red Flags and White Supremacists. Brian C. Joondeph – “The media and entire Democratic Party are judging an entire group of people on the basis of skin color.”

“Then there are the “red flag laws,” which is the left’s new approach to confiscating guns. These laws are unconstitutional three ways to Sunday, violating three of the rights within the Bill of Rights. These laws usurp the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Sixth Amendment’s right of the accused to a speedy and public trial.
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What does this have to do with white supremacy? This past week, Trump supporters are now all “white nationalist” racists. …

How long will it take before states, or the federal government, if a red flag law becomes nationalized, start to view any and all Trump supporters as “posing a danger” based on their skin color, gender, religion, and opposition to open borders?
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Not only Trump supporters, but also those who don’t buy into the man-made global warming hoax. Bill Nye, the bow tie guy, “is open to criminal charges and jail time for climate change dissenters.” Is it a stretch for some bureaucratic panel to determine that someone not buying into the climate change movement “poses a threat” and shouldn’t be allowed to possess a firearm?

Missouri Walmart gun guy will probably walk. Jazz Shaw – “In the end, what Andreychenko is guilty of is first-degree stupidity, but sadly there are still no laws on the books about that.” Yet. See the debate about Red Flag Laws in this context.

When a Mass Shooting Begat Gun Control. Edward Mcclelland – “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre shocked the nation and spurred the most restrictive gun laws America had seen. Here’s why the same thing hasn’t happened today.” Interesting history but watch out for the bias …

Gaslighting, and The Lies Media Moves About Donald Trump. Tony Katz – “This isn’t disagreement. These are lies, purposeful and obscene. And if left unchecked, they can not only destroy a president, they can destroy our nation.”

“Lies have been told. And those lies about President Trump – pushed by media and celebrities and political elites – have been allowed to take hold in America. And we must put an end to them. A decent society demands that lies be called out, and corrected. And those who lie must be called out, and admonished.
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The definition of gaslighting is to manipulate someone by psychological means into questioning their own sanity. Gaslighting by the media is pushing a narrative, theory or belief about a person or group of people that provides political advantage to another; and that group is the Democratic Party and the political Left. Nowhere is this more prevalent than the media vs. President Trump and the GOP, and on no subject is it more prevalent than white supremacy and bigotry in the wake of the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.

Big lies, little lies, important lies, misstatements, gaffs, hyperbole, … all are ammunition for rationalizations and evasions. Discriminating between false witness, deceit, dishonesty, and reality requires intellectual integrity, an appropriate degree of skepticism, and critical self awareness and perception verification.

Democrats Believe Blood Buys 2020 Votes. Thomas McArdle – “The coordinated slurs that prominent Democrats are leveling at President Trump in the wake of the horrific mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton are pure Alinskyite.”

“If they all make sure they stay on message – if no Democrat breaks the circle – the idea is that the public will conclude that their accusations must be true, that we have a president of the United States who is inciting massacres.

Despite Trump having never done any such thing, even when his rhetoric is at its most incendiary.
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“In a fight almost anything goes” – including using the blood of the victims of El Paso and Dayton as a means of attaining the presidency.

The Media’s Disgusting Bloodlust. David Catron – “These vampires are sucking the life out of the social contract.”

“As you lament truncated lives and traumatized survivors, these creatures count eyeballs and clicks. While you worry about the health of our society, they search for a connection to some conservative cause or politician.
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in our era, ostensibly serious journalists would have us believe that a massacre committed by some psychopath in El Paso was the inevitable result of something President Trump said on Twitter or the random chants of people attending one of his political rallies. This is just as crazy as Manson’s claim about “Helter Skelter,” a song written about nothing more sinister than a type of English fairground. Still, rather than adopting the rational position taken by the Fourth Estate when a mass murderer started gibbering about a Beatles tune, contributors to today’s “news” outlets make Manson seem sane:
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Never mind that much of what they say and write about the president is fiction, particularly where race is concerned, yet millions of naïve Americans actually believe these things. This is where the media are doing real harm to the social contract that holds the republic together.

Everything They’re Telling You About Mass Shootings Is Wrong. Chris Buskirk – “For now, I want to focus on faithless Republicans who are being stampeded by an activist-driven, media-empowered hysteria into passing ill-advised gun control legislation that is bad on its surface and is rife for abuse.”

“Democrats also tell us that the police are the only ones who should have guns, which is to say that the police we’re not supposed to trust, who are guilty—in their view—of unspeakable crimes against Americans, should be given a monopoly on physical force and that private citizens should be deprived of their most effective means of defending themselves.
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Labeling someone a “white supremacist” means not only that you don’t have to listen to them anymore, it also means that they are legitimate targets for all kinds of aggression. That’s what the shooter in Dayton, Ohio thought.
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most of what we’re being told about mass shootings and mass shooters is not true and it’s offered on an endless loop in order to manipulate public opinion and to pursue a political agenda that demonizes white people.
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Do you want the people who dox conservatives and get them banned from social media deciding who is allowed to own a gun?

Dayton mayor encouraged protests over Trump visit, the people obliged. Karen Townsend – “Normally, elected officials, especially the ones at the top of the power pyramid, call for calm and ask for community unity when the leader of the free world visits their city or town. Not so in Dayton.”

Civil War As Entertainment. John Hinderaker – “Universal Pictures has produced a film called The Hunt (originally titled Red State vs. Blue State), which begins with rich liberals capturing “deplorables” from red states to hunt down and murder.”

“If you lived in Dayton, Ohio, you might consider this a realistic premise, although I don’t think that is what the filmmakers had in mind. This is the trailer; if I interpret it correctly, the “deplorables” fight back and win what looks like a civil war. In that respect, one might say that the film is realistic.
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Hollywood Reporter repeatedly refers to the film as a “satire.” Apparently standards for satire have slipped over the years.

Trump supporters cleaned up tons of trash and the Baltimore Sun is not happy about it (Update). John Sexton – “Well, here’s one reason things don’t get cleaned up in Baltimore. Scott Pressler says he spent a week requesting permission to have dumpsters on the street for the cleanup. The city never approved the request so Pressler went ahead without the permits. Today he received a denial from the city.”

The Washington Post’s dishonest account of Trump’s Panama City rally. Paul Mirengoff – “In this screed masquerading as a news story, Rucker tried to assign responsibility for the El Paso mass shooting to President Trump.”

The Media Crossed A Line This Week And There’s No Going Back. Bonchie – “the venom with which one side is attacking the other over things they had nothing to do with has reached a new level in the modern era.”

The Obamacare ‘Experts’ Are Wrong Again. John Merline – “When President Trump announced plans to provide beleaguered health insurance consumers a cheaper alternative to Obamacare, critics decried it as “sabotage.” … “It turns out that, like everything else about Obamacare, these predictions were dead wrong.”

sundance at The Last Refuge:

– Wilbur Ross Hits Chinese Cabinet Manufacturers With $4.4 Billion Countervailing Duty – Beijing Caught W/ Stunning 200%+ Subsidy Rate For Chinese Companies…

“Think of China like a big lake filled with U.S. dollars and economic value; the result of our purchases of their products. Through his ASEAN discussions with Vietnam, S Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Japan, et al, President Trump has stealthily built a thin levy, an ASEAN dam of sorts, that will direct the China lake of economic value into Southeast Asia.

– MAGAnomics – An Incredible Team, Delivering Astonishing Results…. “Factually, substantively and empirically the workers of America are gaining ground. Bigger and better than before, and far beyond what anyone else could have delivered.”

“there is something we don’t emphasize enough: The team of Secretary Mnuchin, Secretary Ross, USTR Lighthizer, Trade and Manufacturing advisor Navarro and NEC Director Larry Kudlow, face a scale of opposition almost unfathomable in modern political terms. There are trillions at stake; hundreds of the most powerful financial interests in the world are against them; and yet this team is succeeding.

– Trey Gowdy Discusses Peter Strzok’s Political Lawsuit… “Roosterhead brings up a good point that Strzok left out Robert Mueller in his civil lawsuit against the DOJ and FBI.”

Trump Doubles Down On The China Trade War. Salvatore Babones – “If 1989 was the historical moment to squeeze the Soviet Union, then 2019 is the historical moment to squeeze China.”

“Trump’s aggressive push on tariffs has thrown the country’s expert class into a tizzy, with pundits predicting a severe shock to the American economy, blaming the trade war for every blip in stock prices, and warning of the potential for runaway inflation as consumers pay the price for Trump’s tariffs.

Meanwhile the economy is employing record numbers of people, inflation is running well below the Fed’s target rate, and stock markets are slightly up since the beginning of the “trade war” in April. The data simply refuses to satisfy the pundits’ appetite for economic carnage.

With the economy refusing to cooperate with their “gloom and doom” narrative, America’s pundits are now arguing that economic pressure is no way to get a trade deal from China.
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All of these trends are in America’s national interest. And Trump’s trade war benefits America’s allies, too. In fact, the only country in the world with an interest in China holding all the strings of global value chains is China. If the Chinese don’t realize that, then they’re in for some real surprises as the trade war drags on.

Nicolle Wallace Says “Trump Wants to Exterminate Latinos”, Then She Says ‘Sorry’ at Sara Carter – it seems the operative word is “invasion” which is now racist and means extermination to those on the Left.

Video: Protestors Shout Death Threats Outside McConnell’s Home. Jennie Taer – “Over the chaotic cacophony of cowbells and cursing, viewers can hear a series of death threats being hurled at McConnell.”

“Death Camps For Trump Supporters” Fliers Posted In New York. Tyler Durden – “The fliers feature the threatening text in red and a stylized image of Trump’s face as a skeleton.”

Here’s What A Criminology Professor Learned By Studying Every Mass Shooting Since 1966. Tyler Durden – “Our goal has been to find new, data-driven pathways for preventing such shootings. Although we haven’t found that mass shooters are all alike, our data do reveal four commonalities among the perpetrators of nearly all the mass shootings we studied.”

“First, the vast majority of mass shooters in our study experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. …

Second, practically every mass shooter we studied had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting. …

Third, most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters and sought validation for their motives. …

Fourth, the shooters all had the means to carry out their plans.

Unfortunately, the ideas put up to “prevent future shootings” are like most ideas about trying to control the future or forecast it – they have high risk for low returns. Politics is not on the list but is quite present in the responses to tragedy. Politics is also evident alongside.

Murder: It’s a Democrat thing. Selwyn Duke – “We can start with the striking statistic that 68 percent of all homicides occur in just certain parts of 5 percent of America’s counties — and all, or virtually all, of these are Democrat areas.”

“Also striking is Democrats’ devolution on prenatal infanticide.
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projecting, leftists are also full of the hate they ascribe to others.
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Worse still is how leftists (and the conservatives who defend yesterday’s liberals’ mistakes) destroy children, on the inside, with corruptive miseducation, entertainment, and sexual-devolutionary messages and temptations. From bodies to hearts to minds to souls to statues and traditions and beyond, threatening all that’s great and good, destruction is leftists’ stock in trade.

Democrats exploiting mass shootings for political gain have forgotten the lessons of the Wellstone funeral. Thomas Lifson – “such is the vigor of Trump-hatred that there is a strong possibility of ugly words, gestures, and deeds marring the solemn ceremonies.”

“Today, Democrats face a fundamental challenge in controlling their uglier side that Republicans do not: the media do not warn them with critical feedback. With even the former “newspaper of record” allowing Democrat candidates to rewrite its front page headline,

Warning: How the VA ‘Red-Flags’ Patriots. Michelle Malkin – “Gun-grabbing crisis vultures just can’t let the latest mass shootings go to waste. “Red flag” laws are now all the rage in the Beltway as the magic pill to prevent homicidal maniacs from wreaking havoc on the nation.”

“But if you want to know how this American version of China’s social credit system would work in practice, let me remind you of how Veterans Affairs recklessly red-flags “disruptive” citizens without due process, transparency or accountability in the name of “safety.” Government bureaucrats routinely deprive our nation’s heroes of medical treatment based on arbitrary definitions of who and what constitutes a mental health menace.
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Complain too much. Criticize the powers be. Ask too many questions. Boom! You’re a threat.

If such tyranny is allowed among those who volunteered to protect and serve our country in the name of safety, imagine how it will be implemented among the law-abiding, gun-owning general populace.

How the media redefines “racism in Trump’s America”. Jazz Shaw – “While they manage to provide some balance by including people objecting to these characterizations, the argument that the President is promoting racial animus is the prevailing theme. But when it comes time to cite some proof, here’s what they offer.”

“But if they’re taking a racist message from any politician’s words it’s because they hear what they want to hear. And they lurk in chat rooms where others reinforce their distorted views. What they do with that racial hatred, however, is their own choice and their own responsibility.

You can accuse Republicans of racism all you like. But if you expect to be taken seriously, you’re going to have to do a much better job of making your case.

Trump campaign reported Joaquin Castro to Twitter, but Castro claims there was ‘no call to action’. John Sexton – “Joaquin Castro posted a list of leading Trump donors in San Antonio, Texas along with the businesses where they work. “Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump,” Castro wrote, followed by a list of local businesses owned by some of those donors.”

The Uneasy Compromise Of Campaign Finance Disclosure Is Ruptured. Tom Maguire – “In an era where Administration officials and prominent Republicans are being mobbed and chased out of restaurants (not to mention shot at on ballfields) one wonders where Castro thought this would lead.”

“Democrats want to talk about inciting violence? This naming of private citizens and their employers is reckless and irresponsible. He is endangering the safety of people he is supposed to be representing,” Murtaugh told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Legally the FEC database is public record and the Congressman seems to be on solid ground. But ethically? These campaign finance disclosure rules are meant as a check on “special interests” and the politicians who might end up with reveal conflicts of interest. They are NOT meant to allow incumbents to stir up their supporters and silence the opposition.
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But if the words “chilling effect” still have meaning, what Castro has done here is way over the line. Finance disclosure laws exist in tension with the principle of a private ballot.

Sarah Palin’s Defamation Case Against New York Times Reinstated. John Hinderaker – “It is notoriously difficult–some say impossible–for a public figure to win a defamation case in the current state of the law. If the law of defamation still exists, Palin’s case should succeed. If she can’t win on the facts we have here, the courts should simply acknowledge that, if you are a public figure, it is open season on you, and no redress for libel or slander is permitted, no matter how egregious the facts.”

“A further question is what led the federal district court judge, Jed Rakoff, to bend the rules of civil procedure in rather blatant fashion, so as to throw Sarah Palin’s case out of court.

Paul Sperry: Mueller’s double deception. Scott Johnson – “Recently released court documents suggest Mueller may have made his surprise appearance before the press in Washington on May 29 as damage control after a federal judge privately threatened to hold his team in criminal contempt of court over what she called misleading language he included in his final report about Russian government interference in the 2016 election.”

Bipolarized Journalism… sundance – “Good grief. In the latest exhibition of bipolar narrative engineering, the New York Times encapsulates everything wrong with the current state of U.S. journalism.”

Reza Aslan Calls Kellyanne Conway the ‘Evil We Need to Eradicate’. John Nolte – a follow-up on yesterday’s notice of a reporter inciting violence, the reaction, and trying to walk back or rationalize the hate.

“When someone talks about “eradicating” hate, that is a perfectly acceptable use of the word. Aslan is talking about eradicating a whole person, a woman — which means he wants her eliminated and destroyed forever — he wants a person gone.

Obviously, despite an obvious call for violence, the leftists at Twitter have done nothing to Aslan or his Twitter account.
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Leftist privilege is becoming more and more a problem in our society. People on the left can be as racist, menacing, threatening, and even as violent as they like without facing any kind of social censure from the very same people who will have the rest of us blacklisted for opposing homosexual marriage.

Blame the media for racist violence, not Trump. Marc Weisman – “The leftist playbook is simple: the mainstream media create false Trump narratives, and they repeat them far and wide until the false narrative becomes an accepted “truth.”

“Here is the problem, though: we have yet to see any evidence, even flimsy evidence, that this president really is a racist.
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It’s not Trump, but rather the false Trump racism charges frenetically squawked by the media that likely facilitated this week’s terrible acts of violence. When the media amps up the masses on a steady diet of nasty invective to further their must-remove-Trump agenda, it should surprise no one that unstable people may act out.

Mass Shootings: The Elephant in the Room. Taylor Day “America desperately needs to have a conversation, and it’s very different than the one we have been having when reflecting on mass murders. Despite the hysteria that these events cause, there is no significant upwards trend.”

Rand Paul’s surgery reminds us the Left has no problem cheering political violence. Jack Hunter – “It’s easy to dismiss social media commentators. But the senator’s announcement came just one week removed from actor Tom Arnold (who joined a host of other celebrities who have cheered Paul’s assault) basically saying that Paul got what he deserved from his neighbor.” … “It was just one week ago that an elected official, Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, retweeted Arnold’s insult about Paul.” It is interesting that, after citing a litany of one sided problems, Hunter falls into the ‘both sides the same’ trap.

On Trump’s Excellent Speech. John Hinderaker – “It consisted in large part of denunciations of the murderers and sympathy for their victims. Beyond that, Trump’s comments were notable in several ways.”

Trump’s ‘Teleprompter’ Speech ‘Hit All The Right Notes,’ But Was Just ‘Lip Service’. Scott Morefield – A glaring example of CNN’s bias problem.

China Allows Currency to Drop – President Trump Responds – Devaluation Lowers Consumer Import Prices… sundance – “China needs to buy dollars to backstop their own currency (¥uan). When China trades with the U.S. they hold the return dollars as a peg against their weak currency. Remove the flow of dollars (lessen exports) and they start to run out of strong pegged currency.” i.e. despite a lot of the anti-tariff rhetoric, it is China that is paying the tariff bill, not U.S. citizens. How long China will sustain this cost is the question.

Will China Retreat Into Itself? Tyler Durden – “It’s not even about the value itself, or the change in it, it’s the heavy-handed way it’s executed.” By using government force to set the value of its currency, trust in that value is diminished.

Why ‘policing is racist’ is such a poisonous lie. Heather Mac Donald – “A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings.” … “The persistent belief that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings is a creation of selective reporting.”

“The “policing is racist” discourse is poisonous. It exacerbates anti-cop tensions in minority communities and makes cops less willing to engage in the proactive policing that can save lives. …

The anti-cop narrative deflects attention away from the real criminal-justice problem, which is high rates of black-on-black victimization.

America Is Drowning in the Left’s Lies About Trump. Dennis Prager – “The major news media need to understand these are important reasons that half of America considers them frauds.”

“The reason we don’t recoil when the president labels the mainstream media “fake news” is that we know the charge is true. Has one major media news outlet yet apologized to the American people for preoccupying them for nearly two years with the lie of “Trump collusion” with Russia? Has one Democrat? Of course not. Because with regard to the Trump-Russia collusion issue, the news media were never driven by a pursuit of truth; they were driven by a pursuit of Trump.
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P.S. I just learned that within hours of PragerU posting “The Charlottesville Lie,” Google placed it on YouTube’s restricted list — just two weeks after a Senate hearing at which a Google representative swore under oath that Google doesn’t censor on the basis of political views. The ease with which the left lies is breathtaking.

Mass murderers and the politics blame game… neo – “The attempt to pigeonhole a crazy sociopathic murderer into one political group or other, in particular in order to hurt Trump, is standard and predictable. … All of it is garbage.” The blaming is garbage, the blaming behavior is revealing.

Fake news: an open letter to the Editor of the Washington Post. Christopher Monckton – “Yet again, the hard-Left Washington Post has libeled Dr Willie Soon, whom many of us know to be one of the most dedicated scientists in single-minded pursuit of the objective truth about global warming. If you agree with the following Letter to the Editor, please write your own letter and send it in to the Washpot.”